Quasi-random, more or less unbiased blog about real-time photorealistic GPU rendering

Monday, December 23, 2013

Real-time rendered animations with OctaneRender 1.5

OctaneRender 1.5 has some really powerful features like support for Alembic animations and a fully scriptable user interface. The Alembic file support allows for real-time rendered animations in the standalone version of Octane for scenes with both rigid and deformable animated geometry. Seeing your animations rendered in final quality in real-time with GI, glossy reflections and everything is a blast:

You may remember the actor in the following video from blockbuster movies like "Ultra high detailed dynamic character test" and "4968 daftly dancing dudes on Stanford bunny". Even in Octane, his dancing prowess remains unrivalled. The actor is made up of 66k triangles and there are 730 clones of him (48 million triangles in total). For every frame of the animation, Octane loads the animated geometry from an Alembic file, builds the scene and renders the animation sequence with a script, all in real-time.

Some examples of rigid body animations:

With support for Alembic animations and Lua scripting, Octane has now a very solid foundation for animation rendering in place, allowing for some very cool stuff (yet to be announced) that can be done fully in real-time on a bunch of GPUs (inspired and fueled by earlier Brigade experiments). In 2014, Octane will blow minds like never before.

Skif: Brigade is more optimized for dynamic scenes and interactive navigation than Octane right now, but the gap is closing

Anonymous: merging them is impossible since both engines target different markets and are specifically engineered for it. Octane has a very complex and powerful and flexible node system allowing for very high programmability, but Brigade doesn't require such extreme flexibility.

About Me

Passionate about real-time global illumination techniques and photoreal rendering with GPU ray tracing. Currently project lead at the University of Auckland NZ, photoreal 3D graphics developer and consultant, medical imaging/neuroscience researcher and holding a master's degree in medicine with a background in neurology, neurosurgery, neuroradiology and sports medicine. My tutorial series on GPU accelerated path tracing (with source code) can be found on GitHub.
For questions, email me at sam.lapere@live.be